7 Great Writers On Food at the LA Festival Of Books

To honor the great Los Angeles Festival Of Books starting this Saturday at UCLA, we thought we’d take a sample of writers and artisans that are speaking there and delve into their food memories:

Joyce Carol Oates

Undoubtedly one of the stars of the Festival this weekend is Joyce Carol Oates, who’s very name is foody (she’s also recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Award and she has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize). Oates, best known for her novels including A Garden of Earthly Delights, The Falls and them has a complex relationship to food, telling The Paris Review that she will not eat a bite of anything until she’s finished her writing for the day:

“Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don’t take a break for many hours—and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.”

Oates has developed in her poems and novels a depiction of food in America that amounts to a superb and loving critique of American values.There’s a dark humor to this, for example when Oates imagines people amazed that they have become what they eat::

our thighs are enormous whitely-soft loaves of bread

“Why has this happened”

“What evil has been perpetrated upon us”

“will no one have mercy”

Our skin is waffle-pocked

our fingers plump as breakfast sausage

And in the late 1970’s Oates explored the dead calm of a suburban marriage – in her poem Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money:

Women whose lives are food

breaking eggs with care

scraping garbage from the plates

unpacking groceries hand over hand

Women whose lives are food

because they are not punch-carded

because they are unclocked

sighing glad to be alone

staring into the yard, mid-morning

mid-week

by mid-afternoon everything is forgotten

We’ll come back in a bit to Joyce Carol Oates’ food memories in Lockwood, New Jersey, but let’s meet some of the other writers speaking at the Book Festival this weekend. Meet Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996 and best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Outliers.

Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell’s just published a collection of his articles over the years, and one of his first and favorites was about the inventor-salesman Ron Popeil. Gladwell reminisced fondly about hanging

‘in Ron Popeil’s kitchen, while he made me pasta in his pastamaker and chicken in his rotisserie oven and showed me how to use his hair spray—GLH. That was one of the most hilarious and fascinating afternoons of my life…”

Ron Pepeil’s Rotisserie

And here for the New Yorker is Gladwellonwhy mustards now come in multiple varieties but ketchup doesn’t, discussing the ‘amplitude’ and ‘bloom’ of ketchups along the way,with this choice quote from a super-nerd food taster he interviewed:

“The difference between high and low amplitude in a ketchup is the difference between my son and a great pianist playing ‘Ode to Joy’ on the piano. They are playing the same notes, but they blend better with the great pianist.”

There are going to be a bouquet of food writers at the Fair as well, of course, like Hans Rockenwagner (a real rock opera of a name, that, Rockenwagner’s been described as ‘German engineering applied to modern farm-to-table cuisine’).

Hans Rockenwagner

Rockenwagner now has 3 restaurants in LA:3 Square, Cafe Röckenwagner, Rockenwagner Bakery Cafe as well as a commercial bakery in Culver City. He is talking at the Fair about his cookbook, Das Cookbook.Here’s LA Weekly about the book – which includes his great Herbed Gravlax recipe, by the way.

Another chef turned writer is Roy Choi, the godfather of the food truck movement, with his Kogi trucks. Choi is chef/owner of Chego!, A-Frame, Sunny Spot and POT at the Line Hotel and was named Food and Wine magazine’s best new chef in 2010. He is also an author, of L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food.

Writing about the difference between his mom’s kitchen and those of his friends in the gated Orange County community of Villa Park, Choi says:

“Our house smelled like kimchi and sour soybean paste, not potpourri and potatoes. And that was okay by me: sometimes no matter how exciting a new trip can be, all you want to do is get back home, curl up with your own pillow, and sink into its comforting, familiar reality. Even if that reality consists of salted aged fish eggs and grilled pig intestines.”

Jonathan Gold the LA Times’ food writer is having a discussion at the Festival about the Los Angeles Food Movement with three artisan-writers.

Valerie Gordon and partner Stan Weightman

There’s Valerie Gordon of Valerie Confections in Silverlake and the Grand Central Market- she’s brought some of her delicious sweets into print with her new book Sweet, featuring amazing desserts such as truffles, or from Los Angeles’s lost restaurants such as Chasen’s and the Brown Derby.

Our cookbook challenges the popular notion of what Mexican food is. It goes beyond burritos, nachos, enchiladas, etcetera, etcetera. By exposing people to the regional cuisine of Yucatán, they learn that Mexico’s gastronomy is diverse and rich.And specific to the Yucatán, when they learn about the Mayan, Lebanese, Spanish and Dutch influences in its cuisine, they learn that a region is defined by its history, geography and much more…

Gilberto Cetina

Christine Moore

AS LA Weekly put it, you can have a really nice time atChristine Moore’s Little Flower Candy Co. cafe and restaurant in Pasadena (now also Lincoln restaurant in northern Pasadena):‘Have a coffee and a pastry. Or a glass of wine and crusty bread and cheese. Or duck confit, yuzu chicken salad, gravlax, huevos rancheros, Niçoise salad or a warm bulgur breakfast salad. Or a few pounds of caramels more…”Maybe do all of that whilst reading Little Flower, Moore’s tasty cookbook.

Cocks Cooks these

Heather Cocks is also at the Festival, folks!Cocks and coauthor Jessica Morgan are the creators of the Internet’s wittiest celebrity fashion blog, GoFugYourself.com. They’re the authors of the young adult fiction novels Spoiled and Messy, as well as a new contemporary fiction novel called The Royal We.

Cocks spoke to blog Sweet Potato Chronicles years ago about cooking and eating as a young mother and about her food memories, and these were wonderful in scope and variety:

mem­o­ries of mom cut­ting my bologna into shapes for me; of going to my sister’s soft­ball games and get­ting a Dinosaur Egg jaw­breaker; of going to a divey place after­ward to get the same deli­cious grilled cheese sand­wich; and of course, of our fam­ily birth­day tra­di­tion, choco­late chip pan­cakes for break­fast.

We have a ton of food tra­di­tions. Our special-occasion recipe for mashed pota­toes, we got from a friend when I was maybe ten years old and we still make it; ditto a choco­late kahlua cake recipe that came to us when I was four­teen, which has become kind of my sig­na­ture dessert, along with these ruth­less caramel brown­ies called Utterly Dead­lies.

My dad and I used to make mince­meat pies every Christ­mas sea­son for desserts, and I still do it even though I am the only one who likes them. We always did bangers and mash and caramelized onions for Christ­mas Eve, and I car­ried that into my mar­riage, along with bar­be­cu­ing the Thanks­giv­ing (and Christ­mas) turkey on the char­coal Weber. In fact my dad was the cen­ter of a lot of our tra­di­tions because he loved cook­ing so much, although my mother’s spinach dip must get some props here too.

Lockwood, NJ

We’ll leave you with another snippet from Joyce Carol Oates. Here she is reminiscing about being a kid in Lockport in upstate NY:

The consequence of so much unsupervised freedom was that I seem to have become precociously independent. For not only did I take the Greyhound bus into Lockport but from the bus station I walked to school; while at John E. Pound Elementary, I even walked downtown at noon, to have lunch in a restaurant on Main Street, alone. (How strange this is—wasn’t there a cafeteria in the school? Couldn’t I have brought a lunch packed by my mother, as I’d brought lunches in a “lunch pail” to the one-room schoolhouse?) Though I rarely eat in any restaurant alone as an adult, if I can avoid it, I loved these early restaurant excursions; there was a particular pleasure in looking at a menu, and ordering my own food. If any waitress thought it was peculiar that a girl so young was eating alone in a restaurant, it wasn’t brought to my attention.